Month: July 2018

Accusations of sexual misconduct and nepotism have come out against former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) personnel chief Corey Coleman just weeks after Coleman resigned in June. The Washington Post reports that Coleman, whose $177,150 salaried, senior-level role began in 2011, allegedly used his position to hire and promote both personal friends and women with whom he had a personal interest, despite their lack of qualifications. He also allegedly instituted practices that placed certain female employees in close proximity to certain male employees for sexual purposes.

The Post reports that it received information about Coleman’s behavior from a detailed summary of a seven-month investigation into complaints about the work environment. The investigation was carried out by the staff of FEMA Administrator William “Brock” Long.

“What we uncovered was a systemic problem going back years,” Long told the Post.

Coleman is believed to have hired friends, college fraternity brothers, and women he met at bars and through online dating. He is additionally believed to have circumvented official channels to promote his employees. Coleman is also accused of transferring some of the women he hired to various departments and regional offices so that his male friends could attempt to begin sexual encounters with them. Several of those involved still work at FEMA.

The investigation also alleges a sexual relationship between Coleman and two of his subordinates, one in 2015 and one in 2017. The women supposedly accompanied Coleman on work trips. The first woman told investigators that Coleman attempted to retaliate against her after she tried to end the relationship. She said she managed to keep her job by telling Coleman there was a possibility of them being together in the future. The second woman told investigators that Coleman created a new position for her when she expressed that she wanted to leave the agency—she admitted that she was unqualified for the position.

According to Long, some of Coleman’s suspected activities could be grounds for criminal charges.

Long also asserted that the problems don’t end with Coleman’s resignation. He himself claimed to have sent several harassment complaints to the inspector general at FEMA’s overseeing federal department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). FEMA officials confirmed to the Post that DHS merely referred the complaints back to FEMA. They also confirmed that several complaints were made against Coleman before Long’s arrival at the agency.

Long called for further investigation from DHS in a statement that was released on Monday. He also announced the establishment of an Office of Professional Responsibility to “ensure expeditious, fair, and objective follow-up and resolution of allegations of employee misconduct.”

“The biggest problem I may solve here may be the eradication of this cancer,” he told the Post. “How many complaints were not heard? I’ve got to make sure we have a safe working environment for our employees.”

More than 450 Floridians have been ordered to surrender their firearms since the state’s “red flag” law took effect in March, according to a new report.

Republican Gov. Rick Scott signed the legislation into law weeks after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, claimed the lives of 17 people. The Risk Protection Act allows authorities to file “risk protection orders” (RPOs) against those who supposedly pose a threat to themselves or others. Such people are not allowed to buy or possess firearms.

According to WFTS, the new law has directly affected 467 people, roughly a quarter of whom have concealed carry permits. WFTS reports:

Since the law took effect in mid-March we’ve learned the number of risk protection cases filed in Florida now total 467, as of July 24th and according to the FL Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (DOACS). DOACS oversees gun permit licensing in Florida and is notified when a petition is filed. An agency spokesperson revealed just over a quarter of risk protection cases filed so far involve concealed license firearm holders whose license temporarily is suspended once the order is granted.

Authorities are more likely to seize guns in some parts of the state than in others. In Broward County, where the Parkland shooting occurred, 88 RPOs have been filed in court (it’s up to a judge to decide whether to grant the order). And in Pinellas County, the sheriff’s office has filed 64 RPOs. “In all, we’ve taken in about 200 firearms and around 30,000 rounds of ammunition,” Sgt. Jason Schmittendorf of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office told WFTS.

But the “red flag” law has been criticized by those who say it violates Floridians’ constitutional rights. Though the legislation is meant to stop violent and/or mentally ill people from carrying out shootings, RPOs have been filed in some cases against perfectly sane, harmless people.

In March, Reason‘s Jacob Sullum noted the case of Chris Velasquez, a 21-year-old student who allegedly fantasized on Reddit about shooting up schools. After police portrayed him as a serious threat, a judge issued a temporary RPO against him, even though he didn’t own a gun in the first place. Velasquez successfully argued that he was simply trolling, and the judge declined to extend the RPO.

“These are individuals who are often exercising their First Amendment rights online, who are protecting constitutionally protected speech online,” says Kendra Parris, an attorney who represented Velasquez. “Maybe it was odious, maybe people didn’t like it but they were hit with the risk protection order because of it.”

It’s not terribly difficult for law enforcement to get a temporary RPO. As Sullum points out:

A police officer can obtain a temporary order, lasting up to two weeks, by persuading a judge there is “reasonable cause to believe” that the target “poses a significant danger of causing personal injury” to himself or others “in the near future” if he is allowed to possess firearms. No allegation of mental illness is necessary, and the target has no opportunity to contest the claims about him.

The respondent doesn’t get a hearing unless police want the RPO to last for more than two weeks. To do so, law enforcement must prove that “the respondent poses a significant danger of causing personal injury” to himself or others.

Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute, tells Reason that if authorities want to take away someone’s guns, they should give him the “opportunity to appear in court” and make his case first. “A procedure that doesn’t include” this step, says Neily, whose areas of expertise include constitutional law and gun rights, “is clearly unconstitutional.”

Neily doesn’t think “red flag” laws in general are unconstitutional, but he expressed concern over the lack of accountability involved in the process of seizing someone’s guns. “There’s no accountability for judges and prosecutors, and there’s almost no accountability for police,” he says.

“If you’re a law enforcement officer or even a judge, you’re unlikely to get in trouble for taking guns away from somebody who really wasn’t a threat,” Neily adds. “But you’d get in a lot of trouble for failing to take away somebody’s guns if they then go do something horrible with them.” Thus, “the incentives point in the direction of erring on the side of taking away somebody’s guns.”

Venezuelan President Nicola Maduro took to television last week to announce his solution to the country’s monetary woes: eliminating five zeros on all new Venezuelan bolivar bills.

Sure, that’s an unorthodox—some might say useless—attempt to combat hyperinflation, but the great Venezuelan experiment with socialism continues apace.

At present, the highest denomination bill available is 100,000 bolivars. The new bills, set to hit the streets on August 20, will range from two to 500, with each unit representing 100,000 bolivars. To put that into perspective, as of last month, a cup of coffee in Venezuela cost 1 million bolivars. Maduro initially floated the idea of eliminating three zeros from bolivar bills in March, but didn’t follow through—and four months later it’s seemingly clear that hacking a mere three zeros off the currency won’t solve anything. But five, ah, now you’re getting somewhere.

Hyperinflation has been a consistent problem in socialist Venezuela. Maduro’s predecessor, President Hugo Chavez, enacted a similar policy in 2008, eliminating three zeros from the national currency. It did little to fight the underlying causes of Venezuela’s inflation. Instead of trying the same silly plan again, Maduro must address the underlying problems leading to Venezuela’s inflation if he has any real intention of alleviating the problems facing his country.

With price and wage controls, and a largely centrally planned economy inherently incapable of meeting the needs of its populace despite being gifted with the largest oil reserves in the world, inflation in Venezuela is here to stay until people abandon the state-sponsored currency.

Already in some parts of Venezuela, many people have turned to Bitcoin, derided as highly unstable in the developed world, for an alternate store of value to the overabundant bolivar. As Matt O’Brien noted on Thursday in The Washington Post, the International Monetary Fund increased its end of year projections for Venezuelan inflation from 12,875 percent to 1 million percent in just a few short months.

On Tuesday, economist Daniel Mitchell examined the World Bank report that compared the Chilean and Venezuelan economies on his blog. Despite their similar histories and cultures, Chile abandoned the socialist experiment in 1973 while Venezuela embraced brutal economic collectivism 1999 under Chavez.

The differences are astonishing. Chile has been blessed with enormous economic growth and some of the highest standards of living in South America while Venezuela lags behind with what the IMF has described as one of the worst economic crises in the last 60 years.

Even as socialists in America assert that “Venezuela wasn’t real socialism,” the evidence to the contrary is clearer than ever. The number of zeros on the bolivar is a symptom; socialist central planning is the disease.

The death penalty is surfacing as a key issue in Louisiana’s upcoming gubernatorial election, in 2019. With execution drugs unavailable, the state’s top prosecutor is proposing the use of new drugs, nitrogen-induced suffocation, or “hanging, firing squad, or electrocution,” if necessary.

Lousiana has not executed anyone since 2010 when Gerald Bordelon was killed by lethal injection after being convicted of the murder of his 12-year old stepdaughter. Since then, the state has amassed over 70 inmates awaiting execution on death row.

The state’s lack of access to necessary drugs required for lethal injection remains the largest obstacle to carrying these executions out.

In Lousiana, lethal injection remains the only legal form of execution available. But obtaining execution drugs has become difficult, especially after the drug company Pfizer joined with European drug manufacturers to ban their product from being used for executions.

In 2016, Louisiana requested and was approved for an 18-month extension on the execution of Christopher Sepulvado—convicted for fatally scalding and beating his stepson in 1992—due to not having the necessary execution drugs.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick approved a year-long extension of execution delays after a request was filed by the state.

Defending his administration’s request , Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) said in a tweet that Louisiana was limited by a “legitimate problem with accessing drug protocol.”

But Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (R) is not convinced that the problem is legitimate, nor that a solution is really out of reach for Edwards. In a late July letter to the governor, Landry wrote: “If you truly respect the criminal justice system, the rule of law, and the rights of victims-there are a number of initial steps that can be taken”.

Landry went on to recommend policy changes that would allow the usage of the drug midazolam, which has survived court challenges despite constant malfunctions. Additionally, he recommended that the state begin using the compounding capabilities of Angola, the prison facility where executions occur, to provide drugs while cooperating with the Department of Corrections “to avoid any pitfalls that may arise or to find other compounding pharmacies”.

In 2014, Lousiana Department of Corrections contacted a compounding pharmacy but there remains uncertainty if any products were purchased.

Included with Landry’s letter was draft legislation to expand the state’s options for execution to include nitrogen hypoxia, an execution form that supposedly renders an inmate unconscious within moments, and eventually suffocates them. He goes on further to say that if that option is unavailable, then the method shall be by “hanging, firing squad, or electrocution, in the discretion of the Secretary of the Department of Corrections.”

In an interview with Channel 33 in Baton Rouge, the governor expressed opposition to executions beyond lethal injections. “Hangings and firing squads? No,” said Edwards. “I’m not inclined to go back to methods that have been discarded because popular sentiment turned against them, some methods deemed to be barbaric.”

A potential candidate for governor in 2019, many speculate that Landry will use this issue to score points with the voters who desire a “tough on crime” candidate. This is one of many issues that Landry and Edwards disagree on and continue to battle with one another over.

Some, like New Orleans Advocate writer James Gill, find Landry’s attempt to score political points with such an issue to be disrespectful and poor taste. “Landry wants to bring back hanging, that relic of America’s days as a British colony,” wrote Gill in his July 28 column.

“With polls showing a majority of voters in favor of capital punishment, Landry evidently thinks being gung-ho for carrying out death sentences will aid his gubernatorial aspirations” and “loses no opportunity to suggest Gov. John Bel Edwards is a wishy-washy liberal” on this issue, Gill continued.

Landry’s actions might curry favor with the 58 percent of the Louisiana electorate that favors the death penalty. In May, a bill that would have abolished the death penalty in Louisiana failed to pass the Louisiana House of Representatives and did not make it beyond committee in the Louisiana Senate.

Back in San Francisco in 1967, there was an event that helped catalyze the “Summer of Love” and was variously billed as “Human Be-In” and “A Gathering of Tribes.” It featured a variety of beat-hippie poets (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder), popular area rock bands (such as the mostly forgotten Quicksilver Messenger Service), and Timothy Leary at peak guru-ness, proclaiming it was time to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”

The tribes included

leftovers from the North Beach Beat scene and Berkeley’s antiwar protesters. It meant the Hells Angels and the flower children, and it meant impressionable high school teens and anybody on the cusp of either needing a haircut or deciding not to get one.

Organizers got lucky with the weather, which was sunny and unseasonably warm, conducive to bringing “family, animals, cymbals, drums, chimes, flutes, flowers, incense, feathers, candles, banners, flags,” as one of the posters requested.

That was then, this is now.

Tribes these days are mostly political and you can leave the family animals, feathers, and flowers at home. Here’s Steve Bannon, dismissed adviser to President Donald Trump, ranting about the Koch Brothers (Charles and David, both of whom contribute money to the nonprofit Reason Foundation that publishes this website, the latter being a longtime member of the board trustees) for insufficient loyalty to Fearless Leader:

“What they have to do is shut up and get with the program, OK?” Bannon said in an interview with POLITICO. “And here’s the program: Ground game to support Trump’s presidency and program, [and] victory on Nov. 6.”

Bannon! How many divisions does he have these days? Well, here’s Donald Trump himself, tweeting like a motherless child crying for his Maypo:

The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2018

….them richer. Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed, I’m for America First & the American Worker – a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America Great Again!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2018

The Koch’s sins are that they disagree with Trump on many issues, including criminal-justice reform, trade, and immigration. They want more of it than the president and his supporters, who have managed in just a few years to utterly transform the GOP into the party of protectionists and xenophobes. It wasn’t always this way, as anyone who remembers Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush can attest.

The president of the Charles Koch Foundation, Brian Hooks, puts it this way:

“The divisiveness of this White House is causing long-term damage,” Brian Hooks, a senior Koch lieutenant, told reporters at the event. “When in order to win on an issue someone else has to lose, it makes it very difficult to unite people and solve the problems in this country. You see that on trade: In order to get to a good place on trade, convince the American people that trade is bad.”

There’s a reason why Donald Trump was able to win the presidency with 46 percent of the popular vote. Political tribalism, unlike its hippie counterpart, demands blind loyalty. Shut up and get with the program, as Steve Bannon puts it. But the tribe that Donald Trump and the Republican Party represent is growing smaller every day. The same holds true for Democrats as well. Each party has devolved into less-appealing clusters of incoherent special interests that, while being less representative of America in general demand even more unthinking loyalty. Go find a pro-choice Republican and a pro-life Democrat (these creatures once existed). Since when did believing in lower taxes mean you had to rage against millionaire football players for kneeling during the National Anthem? Or that allowing children brought here illegally by immigrant parents meant you had to support single-payer health care?

As Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina told Reason earlier this year (full interview, transcript here):

“You have two parties in a heterogeneous country where people have all kinds of views… It’s simply not enough to represent diversity in this country.”

In his latest book, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate, Fiorina argues that Americans actually agree with each other on fundamental issues such as immigration, marriage equality, and pot legalization. The polarization we hear about is mostly restricted to political activists and media elites who mistake their own extreme views for those of the common people.

“Everybody worries about the average American being ensconced in a filter bubble,” says Fiorina. “Most of the research suggests it’s the elites who are in these filter bubbles…and have this biased view of the world.”

Steve Bannon’s bubble was burst a year ago when Trump sent him packing from the White House but he has re-emerged as a vocal defender of his former (future?) boss. Trump’s repudiation of the Kochs lays out neatly one of the most scurrilous forms of argument: You are not allowed to criticize a system by which you benefit. Via his tax cuts, he made the billionaire brothers richer, therefore they have no right to say anything critical about me and my tribe.

This way madness—and increasingly precarious electoral majorities—lies, whether we’re talking Trump Republicans or socialist Democrats, who are espousing their own version of shut up and get with the program. The upside is that such purity tests and demands will, as Fiorina points out, drive ever-more people out of the political duopoly and swell the ranks of independents who already comprise a plurality of American voters. Change is coming, always too slow, but it’s coming soon to a polling place near you. And it will reward politicians and parties with a coherent, positive message about decreasing the size, scope, and spending of government and increasing individual autonomy.

Parting video: Among the various songs that may have been inspired by the Human Be-In was The Byrds’ elegiac “Tribal Gathering,” from their 1968 LP The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Take a listen below:

Celebrities, union activists, and politicians demand that the government raise the minimum wage for restaurant workers. They are upset that in 43 states, tipped workers can be paid a lower minimum wage than other workers. The logic behind the lower minimum is that the tips make up the difference.

That’s not good enough for people like Buffalo University law professor Nicole Hallett. She tells John Stossel that, “the problem with tips is that they’re very inconsistent.” She wants to “require restaurant owners to pay the same hourly wage that all other employers have to pay.”

But many restaurant workers like the current system. Waitress Alcieli Felipe tells John Stossel, “don’t change the rules on tips…. If you raise the minimum wage, it’ll be harder for restaurants to keep the same amount of employees.” She works at Lido, a restaurant in Harlem, and says, with tips, she makes $25 an hour, “by the end of the year I made around 48 to 50,000 dollars.”

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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

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